Attentive names Eric Miao CEO, unveils AI-led strategy

Attentive has outlined a new AI-led strategy under Chief Executive Officer Eric Miao and made its Model Context Protocol generally available.

Miao, a co-founder of the retailer marketing software group, is positioning the business around what it describes as individualised marketing across the full customer lifecycle. The approach centres on AI making real-time decisions about when brands should contact shoppers, what they should recommend and when they should hold back.

The announcement is an early strategic signal from Miao in the top job and reflects a broader push by software providers to move beyond campaign tools towards systems that automate more of the decision-making behind customer relationship management.

Marketers will still define goals, budgets, brand standards and approval requirements, while the underlying system executes decisions within those limits. Attentive says the model is designed to give marketing teams visibility into the actions taken and the results produced.

Miao has been involved in the company's AI product strategy for the past three years and previously led its customer success team. Attentive says his background also includes performance advertising, which has shaped its product direction.

In a statement on the company's direction, Miao said the shift goes beyond simple automation. "A lot of what's called agentic AI in marketing today is really just automation with a new name. At Attentive, we've already been harnessing the power of machine learning and AI for years to make decisions for specific moments across the shopper journey. This laid the foundation for something much bigger," Miao said.

He added: "Connecting that intelligence across the full customer lifecycle is the next step, and it will transform CRM, finally letting CRM deliver on what it's aspired to the whole time-truly 1:1 personalized marketing, built for every shopper, automatically learning and adjusting over time."

Existing products

The company is building the strategy on products already in market, including AI Grow, AI Pro and AI Journeys. According to Attentive, those tools are used across subscriber acquisition, campaign management and customer journeys.

Attentive says brands using AI Grow recorded a median 25% increase in email and SMS sign-ups from existing website traffic and a median 35% increase in welcome-series revenue compared with their previous setup. It says users of AI Pro and AI Journeys saw a 20% increase in segmented campaign revenue and a 200% lift in journeys revenue, respectively.

The data supports a broader argument that AI in marketing is becoming less about writing copy or generating content and more about deciding which action to take for each customer at a given moment.

Chief Technology Officer Andrew Sega said the company's next step is to widen the range of signals and data feeding those decisions. "The more context AI has about a customer, the better decisions it can make," Sega said. "We're building a flexible system that brings together data from across a brand's entire ecosystem with real-time customer signals across SMS, email, RCS, and push, giving AI a more complete understanding of each customer and the intelligence to determine what to do next."

MCP rollout

Alongside the strategy update, Attentive said its Model Context Protocol, or MCP, is now generally available. The tool lets marketers connect AI assistants, including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, to approved Attentive data and workflows.

Marketers can use prompts to access data, build audience segments, and create or edit campaigns and journeys. Brands can choose whether to allow changes and can review customer-facing work before it goes live.

Attentive says the product includes its compliance and deliverability safeguards. It is also designed to work with existing marketing platforms through governed integrations rather than forcing brands into a single system.

Two customers were cited as early users of the MCP setup. ReserveBar uses it to automate weekly performance reporting, while MintRX uses it to analyse historical campaign data, inform new marketing plans and identify issues in existing journeys.

The launch reflects a wider trend in software markets as vendors look for ways to connect generative AI assistants to proprietary business systems while retaining approval controls. For marketing teams, that increasingly means using external AI tools not only for analysis but also for direct access to operational workflows.

Attentive's position is that those workflows should remain under marketer supervision even as more tasks shift to machine-led decision-making. The company says marketers will continue to review customer-facing output before publication, with the system operating inside defined boundaries.